In JVC 15.1, Rosalind Crone examines a host of evidence from Victorian prison records about prisoners’ schooling and their ability to read and write. What does this data tell us about the reading public in the nineteenth century and about the spread of literacy, especially among the labouring classes? Girls’ School at Tothill Fields Prison, from Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1862), facing p. 356.
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‘Nobody’s Fault’: Little Dorrit, Andrew Davies and the Art of Adaptation
Author: Valerie Purton Little Dorrit, adapted by Andrew Davies, directed by Dearbhla Walsh, Adam Smith and Diarmuid Lawrence, produced by Lisa Osborne, starring Tom Courtenay, Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen, broadcast in 14 half-hour episodes on BBC1 from October to December 2008. ‘In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to repeat the same words’ wrote Dickens in 1857.1 Andrew
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